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thedrifter
05-28-06, 09:34 AM
Given to me by hubby...fontman

Springtime for Killing in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
May 28, 2006

To most Americans, Afghanistan has been a war of great clarity, the
opposite of the war in Iraq with all its troubles and cloudy origins.
Attacking in a moment of unified anger, with
global allies beside it, the United States had a clear mission: respond
to an assault on American soil by driving Al Qaeda fighters from their
bases in a country undeniably tied to
the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001.

Victory over the Taliban government was swift, and the aftermath
gratifying: Afghans welcomed American troops and aid workers, and seemed to
settle into a pattern, however
fitful and difficult, that would lead to recovery, stability and
increasingly democratic government. And this summer Americans would start
drawing down forces in southern
Afghanistan, replaced by British, Canadian, Dutch and Australians under
NATO command.

Or so Americans thought.

In the last six weeks, a resurgent Taliban has surprised the Americans
with the ferocity of its annual spring offensive and set some officials
here to worrying that the United States
might become tied down in a prolonged battle as control slips away from
the central government - in favor of the movement that harbored Al
Qaeda before 2001. And the number
of American troops has quietly risen, not fallen.

"Afghanistan is the sleeper crisis of this summer," says John J. Hamre,
who was deputy defense secretary from 1997 to 1999.

Not only have officials been surprised by the breadth of the militants'
presence and the brazenness of their suicide attacks, roadside bombings
and assaults by large units. They
have also had to face up to the formidable entrenched obstacles to
transforming Afghan society: the deep rivalries among ethnic groups,
warlords and tribal leaders; the history of
civil war; the trouble central governments have in extending their writ
beyond the capital; and the hostility toward efforts to attack poppy
growing and drug smuggling, which give
many a livelihood.

The Taliban benefit from all those weaknesses. Their fighters have
joined forces with drug smugglers against the government and Western
troops. And they have gained
sympathy from fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan who, a decade ago, helped
them seize power in Afghanistan in the first place.

With all of that figuring in the current turmoil, the Pentagon is now
rethinking the pace of its plan to draw down the forces there. In fact,
it beefed up troop levels to as high as 23,000
from 19,000 in recent months, including more helicopters and crews,
engineers and infantry troops, even as its allies fell short in delivering
the forces that might have let many
Americans come home.

The recent fighting, the fiercest since 2001, has been mainly in three
southern provinces where the Taliban have traditionally been strong,
and where NATO is scheduled to take
over. That planned shift seems to help explain the Taliban's timing.

According to American military officials, the Taliban began preparing
to ramp up the violence once it became clear that NATO planned to bring
in 6,000 troops to replace
Americans. Hard fighting, the Taliban presumably calculated, would test
the allies' commitment to stand and fight, and the will of Western
voters to support a fight.

"It was to be expected that the Taliban would exploit the fact that we
are changing from one operation to the other," said Rear Adm. Michiel
B. Hijmans, defense attaché at the
Dutch Embassy here. His country has about 1,300 troops in Oruzgan
province.

At the same time, British and Afghan Army forces for the first time
pushed into parts of northern Helmand province, the center of the illicit
poppy-growing region, drawing fire from
drug traffickers and increasing the number of Taliban fighters whom the
traffickers hired for security.

Military commanders say the emboldened Taliban fighters have now
shattered a sense of relative calm and political stability in the south,
terrorizing residents who already were
skeptical that the government could offer security and services in the
hinterlands. Militants have set off 32 suicide bombs, 6 more than in
all of 2005, Pentagon officials say. The
number of roadside bombs is up 30 percent over a year ago, with
insurgents getting designs off the Internet.

And in the past two weeks, Taliban fighters have appeared in battle in
groups of up to 300 men, more than triple the size of the largest
groups seen before. The militants draw not
only from hardened fighters spirited in from sanctuaries in Pakistan,
but from impoverished farmers who are paid $4 for every rocket they
launch at allied troops.

"It's fair to say the Taliban influence in certain areas is stronger
than it was last year," Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the senior American
commander in Afghanistan, said earlier this
month.

Meanwhile, the Americans are finding the Pakistanis much more reluctant
to face down the Taliban - who are brethren from the Pashtun ethnic
group that dominates in Afghanistan -
than they have been to confront Al Qaeda, who are largely outsiders.
"Has Pakistan done enough? I think the answer is no," Henry A. Crumpton,
the American coordinator for
counterterrorism, said in Kabul this month, in comments that Pakistani
officials protested. "Not only Al Qaeda, but Taliban leadership are
primarily in Pakistan, and the Pakistanis
know that."

The pitched battles in southern Afghanistan have left more than 250
people dead, and by last week their impact was competing with Iran and
Iraq for the attention of policy makers
in Washington.

After President Bush met with his National Security Council on
Afghanistan last week, administration officials played down the notion that any
big changes in policy were
considered for Afghanistan, where American assistance has totaled $10.3
billion so far. But lawmakers and their aides summoned Pentagon
intelligence analysts for classified
briefings and suggested that the violence might force a re-evaluation
of the plan to reduce American troop levels there to about 16,500 by
this fall.

"The handoff to NATO is the right thing to do, but we should certainly
assess our troop presence there," said Senator John McCain, Republican
of Arizona. "If you study the Iraq
war, one of the major reasons for our difficulties clearly is that we
never had enough troops on the ground, ever."

As a result, plans for NATO to take control of American forces in
eastern Afghanistan by year's end may be postponed until early next year to
assess NATO's effectiveness in the
south, said a senior administration official who was granted anonymity
to discuss internal deliberations. "We've made tremendous progress in
Afghanistan and no one wants to
endanger that progress or move too quickly to satisfy some external
deadline or agenda," the official said.

General Eikenberry said he expected a fierce summer but thought that
the fighting would die down by the fall. Even after NATO assumes control
in the south, perhaps in late July,
the United States will still be the largest contributor of troops in
Afghanistan, hunting terrorists, training Afghan soldiers and the police,
and supporting Afghan counternarcotics
missions.

"I'm more concerned in the long term about the results of the drug war
in Afghanistan than I am about resurgent Taliban," said Gen. James L.
Jones, a Marine officer who is the
NATO military commander. In the end, these officials say, if the Afghan
police and Army can hold their own against the Taliban and bring
security, the Afghan people will welcome
that. The government and its NATO allies have not lost the people yet,
they say. But it is getting close to that.

--- Carlotta Gall contributed reporting for this article from Kabul,
Afghanistan.

-30-

Semper Fidelis,
Mark